You turned down a woman's offer to give you a ride home? That would have been a golden opportunity to act all concussed and claim to not remember where you live. You could have gone home with her!!!

 

She looked to be around 60 years old or so. Sweet lady, but not my type.


On a related note: God bless the People's Republic of California.

Since I've been unable to leave the house for the past few days, I'd been slightly worried about the state of my provisions. In particular, I was running out of rum.

Under other circumstances, this would be a serious dilemma. But not here in the liberal southwest. I just had an order of rum delivered to my house.

Suck on that, you pompous New Englanders with your commie liquor laws.

 

Only cool if you greeted the delivery guy in a bathrobe

 

I know I'm not technically a yankee, but it is legal to have beer-wine-liquor delivered in Virginia.

 

Maine seems pretty relaxed on its liquor laws (besides making bars close at 1AM), but I've never heard of liquor delivery. Bummer.

 

Connecticut allows open containers for passengers, correct?

ROAD SODASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

 

VA has no state laws against it. There are some local county laws, but no universal open law.

 

man I can't wait to drink some road sodas in Brain's car

 

 

Fun fact:

Out of curiosity, I happened to pull up Federal Form 8910 while I was doing my 1040 this past week. This is the form for "Qualified Plug-in Electric Drive Motor Vehicle Credit," which lets you deduct 10% of the cost of a plug-in EV which you put into service in 2012. And it's not just cars- they specifically call out that it includes two and three-wheeled electric vehicles.

Wanna know why I can't claim this credit? Because my EV is too efficient. In order to qualify, a two or three-wheeled EV needs to be "propelled to a significant extent by an electric motor that draws electricity from a battery that has a capacity of not less than 2.5 kilowatt hours." Because of the extremely light weight and high efficiency (about 20 wh/mile, typically) I only need a 600 watt-hour battery.

If I wanted to benefit from a tax credit designed to promote efficient transportation, I'd need something heavier and less efficient.

 

I thought you bought multiple batteries this year for a total of more than 2.5kw amirite

 

Isn't that their way of keeping the tax for cars? I think they'd rather you have a slower bike to not kill the pedestrians.

Their hope is to give an incentive for "eliminating" one of the gas sucking cars stuck in traffic daily.

 

No, 2.5 kW/h is actually a totally reasonable number for a factory-built electric motorcycle. Looking at the offering from Brammo and Zero, the very smallest street bike they build has a 3 kW/h battery, and the bigger ones range from 6-9 kW/h.

I just find it interesting that by electing to use something which has an even lower environmental impact than one of these store-bought bikes, I don't qualify for the tax credit intended to promote energy efficiency.


I never ride on sidewalks or in pedestrian rights-of-way. I ride on the street along with the cars, where bicycles are officially sanctioned to operate.


Which is exactly what I have done.

 

You did it without the money/incentive. Why should you get it now after the fact?

 

Technically he did the right thing, he shouldn't need the incentive to get rid of pollution. He shouldn't be baited with tax returns or whatever discounts to run clean. Being rewarded for doing so on his own means more.

 

Bullshit. The government didn't create those tax incentives because they felt like it. They have a purpose, to push people to less harmful transportation. If there is a problem with the law, then it should be changed.

I think it's stupid to have an arbitrary difference like that, but I assume it keeps people from writing off their kids toys on their tax returns or something similar.

 

I'm talking specifically about Joe here.

 

I'm sure you're correct.

It's difficult to create regulations such as that which simultaneously thwart nuisance exploitation while not infringing upon a minority of legitimate uses. They might, for instance, have required the vehicle to have an unassisted range of 20 miles with an adult rider. But then you can just pile a bunch of car batteries into the back of a child's toy.

So if I mounted a pair of 80Ah car batteries on the bike and wired them in series with the existing pack, I'd have a battery system rated at precisely 2.52 kW/h.

Of course, the cost of doing this would exceed the amount of the credit that I could claim, and it would make the vehicle less safe by adding a considerable amount of weight...

The fact is that there's just no way for them to actually enforce the spirit of the law in a reasonable manner. In theory, a person who simply walks to work every day should receive a much higher tax credit than a person who spends $30,000 on a Prius, at least, if the true intent of the law is to reduce pollution and/or fossil-fuel consumption.

But how on earth do you regulate something like that?

 

Impossible to craft perfect regulation?

Eliminate all regulations.

 

So let me get this straight: they want to give a tax break to people who buy fuel efficient vehicles while, at the same time, the government is also trying to figure out how to impose a tax upon fuel efficient vehicles because they're not paying their "fair share" of infrastructure taxes via fuel taxes...

The whole "redistribution of wealth" thing has gotten out of hand when bureaucrats decide that they need to enforce "redistribution to ourselves"....I wonder how efficiently THIS government program is working...